The team spent their summer participating in (and winning!) a “Sense of Wonder” – a competition hosted by TGS for game developers to win a free both in the indie area.

Now that the team is back on Gotland, here are some of their take-aways:

The people we met mostly don’t speak english, though sometimes they can understand it. If given the choice, they prefered our broken Japanese over their limited English. We recommend you learn some basic Japanese and make sure all your materials are available in both English and Japanese!

Japanese people seem shy, and even more so because you are a gaijin. You have to invite them to the booth, they won’t approach on their own. To get them to play; wait until they show the slightest bit of interest, then invite them.

The venues in Japan all had aggressive air conditioning. It’s cold and your throat dries out quickly. Luckily there are vending machines everywhere with water, tea and soft drinks.

“A lot of departments look at game design from a media studies or from a computer science perspective, but we have an actual subject that is called games design,” Jakob explains. As part of the university’s faculty of arts, students sit alongside those from gender research and philosophy, narratologists and pedagogists, giving designers and developers the opportunity to work in areas such as medicine and psychology. The university also hosts a summer school in serious games where they teach the likes of biologists and physicists – “People with skills that can actually save the world,” Jakob says. […]

So if games themselves can serve as teaching tools, how do you teach aspiring game designers to do this effectively? For Jakob, one of the most important things students need to be equipped with is “some kind of ethical backbone.

“Since you’re making a mass product, you have a responsibility toward the world that you are communicating with. If you’re going to disrupt order you need to have thought about it long and hard. Game design is such a craft that a lot of students focus on the creation, but sometimes we forget to reflect on why we’re making something.” […] So right from the outset, students are taught to design with intent …

There’s a good chance that your reading list is overwhelmingly male if you follow a lot of game developers and designers, even though you might be making a conscious effort to follow more women.

Well good news, everyone! Finding new sources for inspiration, experience and skill just became a lot easier. Our former student Emma Johansson and her New Zealand studio Runaway Play has created #GirlsBehindTheGames – a worldwide movement to highlight the women and benefits of gender diversity in the games industry, with participation from hundreds of deep-in-the-trenches developers from studios like Bioware, Capcom, EA UK, Google, Nyamyam and UsTwo Games.

Emma Johansson, the studio’s creative director, said they’re close to gender parity, with a dozen women on the 26-strong team. That includes two women in the company’s leadership roles. She said they felt like they were “crushing the glass ceiling” in an industry traditionally dominated by men, and wanted to share their story about the benefits of gender parity.

“We were expecting to get maybe a few hundred followers on our twitter accounts, maybe a few shares and likes,” she said.

The campaign went far beyond that. It was shared online by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and “took on a life of its own”. […]

At GAME we pride ourselves on taking an active and vocal stance in social and ethical issues within the games media and -industry. We let topical issues infuse nearly all courses and discuss representation, equality and social issues from year one of the undergraduate. We have to do this in order to teach our students to be responsible creators, and to stand up for what is right, even when that seems difficult.

The work that Emma is doing – both in the company and in the community – is incredibly important, and it’s with great pride that we can point to her as one of ours! Follow @grlsbehindgames for lots of good stuff!